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SLAM turns 30 and Nike puts the magazine's own graffiti on a shoe — the same imagery the league once wrote a rule against.

SLAM Magazine turns 30 this year, and Nike Basketball marked it with a four-sneaker capsule — Sabrina 4, Ja 4, GT Cut 4, Hyperflight — built around SLAM's own graffiti and old cover art printed straight onto the uppers, orange running through every colorway like a house color. The Sabrina 4 dropped first, August 22: mint foam and graffiti print over a chunky basketball sole, SLAM's own insignia stamped into the outsole.

SLAM launched in 1994 on an explicit design brief from founder Dennis Page: a basketball magazine with a hip-hop voice, not the other way around. Look like Vibe, read like The Source. The cover that made that brief real ran five years later — March 1999, issue 32, Allen Iverson in a Mitchell & Ness throwback jersey, full afro, gold chains stacked over the collar, shot by Clay Patrick McBride under the cover line "Soul on Ice." Dennis Page has called it the most iconic cover SLAM's run in 270-plus issues. It's also the cover credited with getting Nike itself to start buying ad pages in the magazine.

Six years after that cover ran, the NBA wrote a leaguewide dress code banning exactly what was on it: no chains or medallions worn over clothing, no headgear, no throwback jerseys courtside. Iverson, the same guy from the cover, called it out directly at the time — "They're targeting my generation, the hip-hop generation."

Twenty-one years after the ban, Nike is selling that exact look back as a licensed 30th-anniversary product — the chains, the throwback fit, the graffiti straight off the cover that got it banned in the first place — for $135 a pair.